The
superior freedom of the capitalist system, its superior justice, and its
superior productivity are not three superiorities, but one. The justice follows
from the freedom, and the productivity follows from the freedom and the
justice.

- Henry Hazlitt,
1962

The
concept of freedom, in its socially relevant sense, means the condition of
individuals being free from aggression by others… It rests on the recognition
of every individual’s equal moral nature as a self-determined and
self-responsible agent, regardless of admittedly enormous circumstantial
difference.

- TiborMachan, 1998

As some of my blog
readers will be aware, I have been engaged in a debate with a philosophy student who’s been enjoying
bashing what he thinks to be libertarianism. In his view, libertarians advocate
‘thin freedom’ because we advocate only that human beings should be free from
the initiation of force; he maintains that we should instead advocate a
‘thicker’ form of ‘freedom’ – namely the forcible appropriation of wealth and
the enslavement of other human beings for our own ends. He calls this ‘substantive
freedom,’ but perhaps ‘thick’ might be the correct term.

IV) Our political philosophy should concern itself with what really matters.

Therefore,
V) Our political philosophy ought to concern itself with the promotion of
substantive liberty.

VI) Sometimes this will involve sacrificing a less important liberty for the
sake of a more important one. (But even libertarians are committed to this --
see I)

I’ll respond to his claims and criticisms
directly in due course, but first I have three main points in response to his
substantive criticism of my
lengthy piece:

1) His fundamental error (one he shares
with Karl Marx, oddly enough) lies in collapsing the distinction between
existential freedom and political freedom.

2) He refuses to understand where wealth
comes from, and why it is necessary; and

3) he’s simply
ignored my arguments where they depart from his own flawed account, so what
he’s essentially criticising me for is that my argument doesn’t fit his own
rationalistic model.

But this just won’t do, and in my view
there’s no point in even discussing such utterly flawed claims as “Money is not like natural abilities - it is a social
rather than natural artefact” until the fundamental arguments are engaged.

He’s criticised my points then because, in
my view, he’s either missed my arguments or he’s misunderstood them. He’s read
the conclusions and ignored all the arguments for them. I suspect he expected
from me an arid linear argument in the form of the philosophical shell-game
that he’s familiar with at school, whereas what I offered instead was a
hierarchical argument that assumes a real-world context.

He’s skipped past my arguments for
individual rights, for example, as just so much ‘flyover country’
to be dismissed as irrelevant.

He’s ignored my point that rights actually
set up ‘boundaries’ between people, within which we each have ‘moral space’ to
plan ahead and pursue our values in confidence, and that these boundaries are
set by the mutual co-existence of all such rights. Far from rights ‘clashing’
or setting up ‘rival liberties’ the boundaries cohere along the points where
one person’s rights meet those of another. As the saying goes, my freedom ends
where your nose begins – there is no ‘conflict’ over such a boundary. The
`border' analogy is useful, even if it runs the risk of giving a physical image
of a person's sphere of moral authority, explains TiborMachan, because we ‘moral agents’ – ie., human beings --require ‘borders’ around them so as to know what our responsibilities
are and where others must ultimately leave decisions up to us.

He’s totally ignored my point
that without property rights no other rights are possible, including the
right to life. It is property rights that give us a ‘place
to stand,’ and it is our nature as human beings that requires and
vindicates the concept.

He’s completely ignored the importance of
not owning your body, but being your body. First, if you ground
your argument for ownership on owning your body, you’re begging the question
you’re trying to prove; second, when you recognise that you are your body and that you’re not
immortal, then you may realise you must take the actions necessary to maintain
your body and your life. And you must be free from outside coercion to do so.

He’s ignored my point that in the context
of politics, freedom is not freedom from the laws of nature but – crucially --
freedom from physical coercion. See on this point TiborMachan’s article Two Senses of Human Freedom,
and his book ‘Classical Individualism’ (reviewed
here by IrfanKhawaja)
which also covers all the territory we’re covering here.

He’s ignored my point that you don’t expand
freedom by taking it away from someone else. You can’t free one person by
enslaving another, which is precisely what his so-called ‘positive rights’
serve to do, as I explain here.
‘Positive rights’ are not rights at all but benefits,
and these need to be produced. How? Somehow. Further,
your choice of what is a basic ‘positive right’ is not necessarily mine, so we
naturally devolve into subjectivity. Is tertiary education a ‘positive right’? Cosmetic surgery?Wide-screen TV?
The arguments for ‘poistive rights’ just devolve into
subjectivity, slavery and absurdity.

He’s ignored the distinction
between coercion– in which one’s
rights and one’s self are aggressed against -- and self-defence, in which one legitimately defends against such
aggression or empowers the government to do so on one’s behalf. Calling
self-defence a ‘negative right’ is really just a means of confusing the obvious
point.

He’s ignored (as did Karl Marx) the truth
that the values needed for living can’t just be picked off trees, or stolen
from others --they need to be chosen,
they need to be produced, and we each must be free from outside coercion to do
that.

He’s ignored – in fact he’s completely
misunderstood -- my point that resources are not resources at all until they
are identified as such by a human mind, and that it is in part from that
identification that ownership then proceeds.

In short, in my view, he’s totally ignored
my arguments and he’s completely ignored the real world. He’s ignored where
wealth comes from and that people do have a right to the values they themselves
have produced, and he’s argued against this only by reality-free semantic
wriggling. The collapse of the Berlin Wall and the myth of Marxist
redistribution should have put paid to any idea that people can be made free by
coercion, or made wealthy by theft. That idea just doesn’t fly, and semantic
wriggling doesn’t change that.

My opponent has argued for example that
being stuck down a well is the starting point to understand freedom; the ‘well
problem’ shows us, he argues, that so-called ‘substantive freedom’ – by which
he means the freedom to do anything you please – is the aim of good government.
Political freedom, he says, is ‘thin’ and insubstantial, and doesn’t get us out
of wells we might fall into. But life is not a process of falling down wells
and asking someone to get you out, or having the government force them to do so on your behalf. I doubt whether anyone has ever been in
that position, and it sure tells us nothing about how we survive, produce and
flourish in the real world.

Which is why you don’t use ‘well problems’
or ‘lifeboat situations’ -- real or imagined -- to tell you about normal life,
nor should you draw principles from them for use in the real world. We do not
live down a well, and nor should we draw principles for living from such arid
examples. Life is a process of self-sustaining, self-generating action, in
which we must plan ahead and produce for ourselves the values by which we live.
Without freedom from physical coercion, we can’t do that successfully. That is
in essence why freedom is necessary, and history shows the need of it.

But has my opponent ever considered why
freedom from coercion is necessary and the link between freedom and wealth? I
don’t believe he has – wealth in this view is just there – it just appeared somehow – and the job of the mind is
only to redistribute in some form of grand utilitarian calculus what somehow
sprang into existence fully-formed.

We need freedom in order to be moral
agents, and we need to be moral agents in order to further our own ends.
Forcing someone to be moral is a contradiction in terms – to be moral agents we
must be free to make decisions, to act on them and to take responsibility for
them. To do that our ‘moral space’ must be protected, which is precisely what
our basic rights spell out.

Has he ever considered, I wonder, how
things are produced, and by whom? Or the link between
property rights and production? On both counts, I think not, and this
lack of consideration leads him to his dismissal of real-world concerns with
arid, rationalist arguments.

My opponent’s hero, G.A. Cohen, has argued
for example that property rights are problematic because, for example, if we
buy a car that turns out to be stolen then there is an ‘initial acquisition’
problem. And if the car is not stolen?Blank
out. Cohen considers my owning a sweater that he wants to be a ‘clash of
liberties’ and a sign of his ‘unfreedom’-- as if we all have a claim to the same
sweater, regardless of who produced it. For Cohen, the burglar and the
shop-keeper are morally equal. (The Marxist philosophy professor is no doubt on
a moral plane above.) In short, he assumes a problem with property and he sets
out from there. He assumes production, and simply sets out from there.

But has he ever wondered where wealth comes
from? Has he ever wondered how the world would got
rich? It didn’t happen by theft: – there are more people alive now than have
ever previously existed with more total wealth than has ever before been seen.
Where did it come from? It wasn’t stolen from somebody else, it was produced.
It was produced by use of the ultimate resource: man’s mind,
and the freedom for us each to exercise our minds in pursuit of our well-being.
Wealth is not stolen; it is produced. By use of our minds, we make ourselves
rich by producing the values we need in order to flourish. The ‘miracle of
breakfast’ helps us understand how.
Our grumbling stomachs help us understand why.
The answer to the
‘problem’ of initial acquisition explains that it is right.

My opponent doesn’t want the shopkeeper’s
property rights protected, but he does
want to be protected from harm himself. He wants the freedom to be protected
from physical coercion, but calls this ‘insubstantive.’
He wants government to protect him, and he wants a guaranteed
income to boot!There’s a name for
that, which most mothers of teenage boys would know … He wants to
be a consumer, sir, and help himself to jam, but he wants to remain unaware
of where production comes from, who produces it, and how.

In short, what he wants is freedom from the
laws of nature. He can’t have it. And he’s not having my freedom, nor my right to my life, nor to the pursuit of my own
happiness. What he and Mr Cohen need to realise is that human beings are not
the means to the ends of other human beings – each individual life is its own
end. To quote from Ayn Rand’s 1938 novel ‘Anthem’

I know not if this
earth on which I stand is the core of the universe or if it is but a speck of
dust lost in eternity. I know not and I care not. For I know what happiness is
possible to me on earth. And my happiness needs no higher aim to vindicate it.
My happiness is not the means to any end. It is the end. It is its own goal. It
is its own purpose.

Neither am I the means to any end others may wish to accomplish. I
am not a tool for their use. I am not a servant of their needs. I am not a
bandage for their wounds. I am not a sacrifice on their altars.

I am a man. This
miracle of me is mine to own and keep, and mine to guard, and mine to use, and
mine to kneel before!

I do not surrender my
treasures, nor do I share them. The fortune of my spirit is not to be blown
into coins of brass and flung to the winds as alms for the poor of the spirit.
I guard my treasures: my thought, my will, my freedom. And the greatest of
these is freedom.

What does freedom actually mean? What is it
actually worth? For each individual it is worth the most sacred thing in the
universe: your life!